Sinister 2Review

If you’ve seen Sinister and plan on going to Sinister 2 because it looks scary, beware that Sinister 2 doesn’t reiterate the rules from the first film, so you might be a little lost. If you’re a spoiler-shouter who hasn’t seen Sinister but is still reading, stop. But if you stop reading here just know that from a horror perspective, from a family drama perspective, from a character perspective -- every angle of this movie series -- Sinister 2 is a laugh-out-loud experience. It’s abysmal, but fun to make fun of.

Sinister was a divisive film for horror and serial-killer movie fans. The first half played like a serial-killer film with a maniac who recorded gruesome murders of various American families. Favoring two-child households, this killer always spared one child who was never found. But the second half of the film turned into a supernatural spook show involving Bughuul, a demonic soul-sucker who loves the aesthetic of 8mm film and has, shall we say, a unique effect on the children it preys upon.

What made the first film divisive is that people generally preferred a section of the film, and most favored the murder mystery of the first half rather than the more supernatural aspect of the latter portion. But even though the first film doesn’t completely work overall, both sections of that film are handsomely made. The snuff films are still unnerving and shocking. The sound design is a vacuum of unsettling atmosphere. And perhaps more importantly, Bughuul is discovered by a cardigan-wearing, whiskey-tumbler-drinking true-crime novelist daddy (Ethan Hawke), Blow-Up style: by freezing on a sliver of a face in an image, and zooming in. Even when Sinister moves into supernatural horror Bughuul is mostly absent -- it’s his collection of Americana kids who are there to scare.

Bughuul is all over Sinister 2. He pops up as a screaming computer virus, he appears in hotel room doorways, he’s on ham radios, he’s in a church, he’s even on a map of Norway! Oh, he’s bad, alright, and he’s worldwide. The once-terrifying masked face of a creepster -- who likes to watch from the shadows -- is now front and center for Sinister 2. That’s one of many mistakes in this film.

Let’s go in order.

The second mistake is that Sinister 2’s snuff films are too elaborate. Sinister’s home movies were incredibly creepy and nightmarish because it involved simple everyday tools: rope, knives, lawnmowers. It’s already absurd that a child is carrying out these murders, but it wasn’t entirely inconceivable that a child could carry them out. Sinister 2’s murders involve alligators, dentistry, and rats that are forced to dig through someone’s stomach due to the heat above. These aren’t quick turns to murder; these home movies require a lot more preparation and expense!

The third mistake is that the point of view is mostly told from the kids’ perspective. Each child is too easily lured into the basement to watch a homemade murder movie. But even more ludicrously, the bully of the new twosome (Dartanian Sloan) is super upset that Bughuul’s ghosts have favored his “weaker” brother (Robert Daniel Sloan), because dammit, why should his brother be the one to join Bughuul? Doesn’t Bughuul see that he has more centuries of nefariousness to offer him? That brother sets out to prove that he’s truly the evil one in the family.

The fourth mistake is bringing Deputy So-and-So (the unnamed aw shucks local deputy who assisted Hawke in Sinister, played in both films by James Ransone aka Ziggy in The Wire) in as the lead. Deputy So-and-So provided a little dumb levity in Sinister, but he cannot lead a film. He looks dumbfounded by everything -- granted there’s a lot to be dumfounded by. Like how -- even though he doesn’t want to visit the crime scene at night -- he always seems to arrive just before nighttime to investigate. And how he’s told, mere hours after meeting the mother of the children (Shannyn Sossamon) in the house next to the crime scene, that she wishes he was the father to her children. When we meet her abusive husband (Lea Coco), who’s always ramped up to 10, ready to pummel children, his wife, and mashed potatoes, it’s just one more thing to add to the pile of Sinister 2’s un-subtleties.

Sinister wasn’t a great horror film, but it fully understood that less is more. And less is scarier.

All of these mistakes (and more!) create an atmosphere not of terror, but of eventual laughter. The biggest laughs come from the focus on vintage murder-inducing art (Bughuul prefers murder through aesthetics, we’re told). Bughuul’s aesthetics are vintage cool. He has infiltrated a ham radio! His ghost kids have a vinyl record to play with their murder tapes! To impress Bughuul, the bully child wants to make the coolest murder 8mm film ever! And to do that, he’ll recreate a vintage movie: Children of the Corn!

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The Verdict

There are many lines in the film worth singling out in jest, but the absolute best is Deputy So-and-So yelling, “You’re not going to finish your movie!” Let’s hope that’s the truth and this is the end of Sinister. But if the sequel is even a mild success, Bughuul’s more modern manifestation -- as a shrieking computer virus -- might prove to be the most appropriate aesthetic parallel: cheap, annoying, and damn near impossible to get rid of.